Reinstall NAS with Debian 10 but preserve software RAID (mdadm)

[Shaqalac]

Hi LTT,

 

I have a small server being utilised as a NAS running Debian 7. It is terribly old and is well overdue for an upgrade of its OS. I'd like to get it running with Debian 10. Initially I was thinking of upgrading the OS from 7 to 8, 8 to 9 and finally 9 to 10. However since the server is more or less only used for hosting the mdadm software RAID, I was thinking if it'd be easier to simply reinstall the OS directly to Debian 10 and assemble the raid again. From what I can see from the documentation, this seems to be fairly straight forward, simply run the following commands after Debian 10 has been installed

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm
$ sudo mdadm --assemble --scan
mdadm: /dev/md/0 has been started with 2 drives.

The question is, is there any risk involved doing this? Of course the server contains a lot of data and there's no way to backup everything (most important data has a backup).

[10leej]

Its really that easy, that said you can also just upgrade the system normally through the software channels just fine.

 

That said this is a big software change and as such you should always have a backup especially since your upgrading the filesystem itself. Corruption is a thing that can happen even though its protected against better than ever. 

 

That said, don't forget to mount the raid array which mounts just like a regular disk.